The Conclusion revisits the major themes of the book and turns to the question of the relationship between craft and practitioner. It considers the idea of the professions as ethically charged categories and offers a brief reading of the Hippocratic Oath on technē and bios. Philosophy, on this account, is not merely a body of knowledge but a lived vocation in which technē and bios converge.

Chapter 8 sets out a reform agenda for a third-generation (3G) UK Stewardship Code, grounded in the book’s normative and empirical analysis. It begins by diagnosing three core limitations of the current regime: conceptual drift; constraints on other-regarding responsibilities linked to materiality and investor duties; and persistent implementation gaps. In response, it proposes reform along two dimensions. First, it calls for a clarified, purpose-driven definition of investor stewardship – centred on a balanced, other-regarding model of enlightened stewardship. This model recognises the interdependence between financial returns and the long-term health of economic, social, and environmental systems, drawing on emerging interpretations of Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006. Second, it advocates strengthening stewardship reporting by embedding reflexivity and institutional learning. The chapter argues that investor stewardship should evolve from a compliance exercise into a credible mechanism for aligning capital with public value. Reimagined in this way, the 3G UK Code offers a forward-looking institutional response to the governance challenges of our time.

Expanding into an increasingly crowded imperial arena, the interests of the colonial powers soon clashed. This chapter explains how they turned to diplomacy to manage these conflicts, beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Contrary to a widespread misconception, the conference did not partition Africa but focused instead on free trade in the Congo Basin, navigation on the Congo and Niger, and rules of notification for coastal seizures. With no effective enforcement mechanism and only limited scope – most coastal areas had already been claimed by this stage – its immediate impact was slight. Yet the General Act concluded in Berlin sent an important political signal: it reassured the imperial powers that disputes in the colonial sphere could be resolved by diplomatic means, fostering the mutual trust necessary for more assertive expansion. Partition then unfolded piecemeal through bilateral agreements that defined spheres of influence, based on the principle of mutual non-interference rather than on effective occupation. The chapter offers a detailed account of Germany’s manoeuvring in East Africa, while also tracing parallel developments in other African territories and the Pacific.

Chapter 1 summarizes information dispersed across various sources that are relevant to the current global context of IA. Specifically, it describes the history and current state of IA, its political and legal foundations, as well as its procedures, processes, and outcomes. The chapter opens with an overview of the global situation of children and frames the discussion of IA through the lens of children’s need for permanent families. The description is intended to be brief yet contextual, providing the reader with a cohesive – albeit abbreviated – understanding of key issues in IA, without requiring consultation of additional sources. Policies in different countries regarding both domestic (DA) and IA are illustrated, and their impact on the current state of IA is discussed.

The Introduction explores the concept of the year book and some of its recent iterations. It sets out the major concerns of this work, which is essentially to read texts, events, and lives through the shared medium of 1859. It sets out the relationship between the three key themes of the book, that is, custom and the experience of history, the relationship between the individual and the collective, and the life and writings of George Eliot, and introduces the argument that will shape the work. This concerns the workings of history and of its dominant form in 1859: custom. The Preface also sets out the methodology of the book and draws on Raphael Samuel’s description of history as an ‘organic form of knowledge’ that ideally draws on multiple sources of information, and on accounts of lived experience and emotions too. In this last respect, literature clearly acts as a great resource.

Leo’s history and the reigns of Basil II, Constantine VIII, and Romanos III. Leo’s history may have provided a cover for Psellos’ anonymous, low-key beginning of the Chronographia, but is unlike it in ethos and direction. Basil’s reign is tightly shaped, fired by his growing addiction to sole power. He takes hold of his role by stages; studies his mentor to eliminate him; makes his army an extension of his will; receives Skleros’ submission in a formal skene; performs his imperial self to audiences; and fortifies the treasury. He is an emperor in formation and a paradigm for the Body Politic. Psellos uses him to create a basic mimetic style. Constantine VIII is Basil’s creation and his anti-type. The role he performs is Not The Emperor. His successor, Romanos III, forcibly married to Constantine’s daughter Zoe, loses himself in fantasy; he wanders on the field and so alienates Zoe at home that she becomes a destructive force. There is a marked development of narrative techniques in imagining internal states and semiotic body language, shifting deftly between competing dramatis personae and points of view. The moribund Body Politic presages Romanos’ death.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the changing attitudes within the Norwegian labor movement towards Israel and the Palestinians from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Initially, Norway was a strong supporter of Israel, with prominent Labor Party figures expressing wholehearted support for the Jewish state. This support was rooted in sympathy for Holocaust survivors and solidarity with fellow leftists in the Zionist movement. However, a significant shift occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s. The Labor Party and the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions began to adopt a more balanced approach, recognizing Palestinian rights and opening dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Several factors contributed to this shift. The Six-Day War in 1967 altered perceptions of Israel from a vulnerable state to a powerful military force. The Lebanese Civil War and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 further damaged Israel’s image in Norway. Norwegian participation in the peacekeeping UN Interim Force in Lebanon exposed many Norwegians to the complexities of the conflict. This shift in Norwegian attitudes towards the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was part of a broader European trend and laid the groundwork for Norway’s later role in the Oslo Peace Process.

Hegel generally characterizes the actualization of freedom as spirit’s activity of liberating itself from nature. This liberation cannot be attained by dominating nature or by simply leaving it behind, since living nature itself presents us with a first form of freedom. Spirit’s liberation from nature rather is a liberation from a dualistic relation to nature and essentially includes a liberation of spirit in nature and as nature. This complex form of liberation is attained by producing a second nature of the right kind. This chapter offers a systematic reconstruction of how such a second nature is brought about, discussing the three essential stages of its actualization: first, the very emergence of spirit from nature in the course of Hegel’s Anthropology; second, the appearance of spirit proper in the Phenomenology; and finally, the actualization of freedom through the institutions of ethical life in his doctrine of Objective Spirit. The section on the emergence of freedom offers a new reading of Hegel’s now much-discussed account of habit. The section on the appearance of freedom develops a new understanding of self-consciousness and a new account of the master–servant dialectic. The section on the actuality of freedom provides a new account of the very form of a free ethical life.

As the colonial crisis deepened in 1906, reforms became increasingly imperative. This chapter highlights the legal and administrative responses to mounting challenges, entailing a fundamental rethinking of Germany’s colonial policy. A budget showdown over the Herero and Nama War culminated in the Reichstag’s dissolution, opening the way for a reorganisation of colonial administration. In 1907, the Colonial Department was upgraded to the Imperial Colonial Office, headed by Bernhard Dernburg, who professionalised the administration and inaugurated a turn towards developmentalism. The expansion of infrastructure, intended to promote economic development, went hand in hand with harsher labour and mobility controls, especially in South West Africa after the 1907 Native Ordinances. Meanwhile, in the metropole, the mounting costs of Weltpolitik fed into protracted fiscal debates. Repeated shortfalls in colonial revenues, combined with the naval race and colonial war outlays, drove tax battles and, by 1913, reluctant steps towards more centralised taxation. In parallel, the 1913 Citizenship Act further nationalised German citizenship. It reaffirmed and generalised earlier provisions for direct Reich citizenship, which had been developed in the colonial context to enable naturalisations outside the framework of the Reich’s constitutent states.

Mostly based on research done by others, this chapter goes through some of the important insights about antisemitism in the socialist and communist tradition and also looks briefly at their relationship to the early social democratic tradition on the Jewish Question. It starts by exploring the idea of the Jews as a symbol of huckstering, money and finance, as we find it in Marx’s thought, and continues by looking at the crucial developments in attitudes to Jews in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest is the influential thinking of Karl Kautsky, which laid much of the foundations for a Bolshevik synthesis of the idea of Jews and Zionism in a Marxist understanding of race and nation. Kautsky’s analysis of antisemitism and Zionism starts with a criticism of the concept of race. The Zionists wanted a state for the Jews because they felt that they would never be in a position to trust the solidarity of their proletarian comrades who were not Jews, an attitude that is a betrayal of Communist understanding of class and history.

Despite Bismarck’s reluctance towards overseas colonies, Germany joined the ranks of the colonial powers in the mid-1880s. Nonetheless, this chapter challenges the notion of a sudden reversal in Bismarck’s stance, showing instead that expansion overseas developed incrementally out of collective dynamics in the international arena that no single country could fully control. Missionaries, explorers, merchants, and lobby groups acted as political entrepreneurs, pressing for Reich protection and creating faits accomplis that governments struggled to ignore. Their initiatives also provoked conflicts with local societies and citizens of rival powers, triggering a self-reinforcing dynamic of competitive expansion. In this international environment, Bismarck’s cautious pragmatism gave way to step-by-step concessions. The chapter provides a detailed historical account of how the Reich came to place Adolf Lüderitz’s acquisitions in South West Africa under its protection, while also tracing parallel developments in West Africa. In this light, the emergence of Germany’s colonial empire appears less the result of deliberate design than an improvised response to dispersed initiatives by non-state actors and the international rivalries they set in motion.